


A Kiss Beneath the Mistletoe

by WinterSwallow



Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: F/M, Out of season fo' sure, Pen & Ink, The search for anti-chemistry, no really!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 04:57:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7877428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinterSwallow/pseuds/WinterSwallow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lady is rarely surprised.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Kiss Beneath the Mistletoe

_Scott kisses her under the mistletoe._

She will replay every moment of it in her head for the rest of the night. How his kiss is rough but passionate, how he tastes of mint and cinnamon, how she stands stunned, like a marionette, before her hands come up and grip his lapels in order to shove him off. 

She will replay every moment in her head and she will feel stupid.

Because a good agent does not blunder blindly into a trap. Yet that is what she has just done. 

She takes a moment to gather herself before she turns to look at him, presses her hand to her chest and feels her heart pounding. He is watching her with neither disappointment nor lust, but a wary regard. 

She knows he must be thinking about the kiss too, turning it over and over in his head. Did she wait too long to push him off? Did her body respond to his? 

Did she, even for an instant, kiss him back?

She glances around to see who might have witnessed them, but of course there is no one there. They are alone in her grandmother’s library, where he has lured her under the pretext of wanting to borrow a first edition of _Great Expectations_. The lights are turned down low. She had hung the mistletoe herself, not as a party favour but with one particular person in mind.

“That was beneath you,” she says, smoothing out her dress – McQueen, next season’s collection.  

“Yeah, maybe.” He reaches around and scratches the back of his neck, like a scolded child. “But I wanted to be sure.” 

“That what? I wasn’t in search of an upgrade?”

His gaze slides sideways, focuses on the shaded Tiffany lamp in the corner. He will not meet her eyes.  

The Tracys are a family in the best way, but also a family in the way that prompts murmurs and askance glances and questions in the press, about “ _What do those Tracy boys get up to all alone out there on that island_?” The answer in the gossip rags is not, routinely, saving the world. 

Which is why Scott has one highly publicised tryst with an actress or supermodel a year. It is why Virgil is seen at Burning Man or Glastonbury in the company of some hip young artist or musician. It is why Gordon sometimes goes to parties to which Penelope is categorically not invited and is photographed licking salt off a tennis player’s stomach. 

Their experience with romance is as a glamour, a piece of fiction, flash and dazzle and an underlying wariness that these women are using them for their money or status or position. As much as they may rib John about his lack of interest in anything that doesn’t run on processors, his brothers are not that much more schooled in the subject.

But that doesn’t make her any less angry.  “Are you afraid that I’m hoping to trade one Thunderbird model for another? You’re transparent.” She sneers at him. 

“And you’re not,” he says. “You’re a spy, Penn – Penelope. You use people _professionally_. And I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what you’re up to.”

“Up to? Scott, you’re drunk.”

“You know I’m not.” And it’s true. He’s not drunk for the same reason TB1 and TB2 sit camouflaged in the field behind the cherry orchard. Scott Tracy is never truly off duty, even when trying to kiss girls in libraries. 

“Are you using him?” He stretches out his hand as if he means to grab her, but stops himself before his fingers brush her skin.

“This is none of your business.”

“ _Of course it is_!”

Damn them. Damn the lot of them. Because Gordon never goes down a rope that Virgil hasn’t triple checked and Alan never goes into a room where John hasn’t mapped every exit. And privacy is something you get three minutes a day when you’re showering, so long as an earthquake or a flood doesn’t have one of the others hammering on the door, bellowing that it’s time to suit up. Secrets are something that happen to other people.

“It’s my job to look out for them,” he says. “And… and I don’t want to have to burn my best agent.” He lets the threat dangle.

“Whatever you think of me,” she says, “I’m not trying to use him. I- I-” But she can’t say it, hasn’t said it to him, hasn’t even said it to herself yet. Is certainly not going to admit it to his older brother at his most priggish and entitled. “I need to get back to my party.”

“No, I’ll go,” he says, “Excuse me for interrupting your evening.” But at the door he pauses. “He’s not what you think he is, you know? He’s not as old or as smart or as world weary as he thinks he is. You can hurt him.”

“Scott,” the sound of his name stops him, “You’ve never looked more like your father.”

He grunts and she doesn’t know if he took it as an insult or a compliment, doesn’t know which she meant it as. “Merry Christmas, Your Ladyship.”

When Gordon, flushed and full of good cheer, comes to find her a little later, she is holding the branch of mistletoe in her hands. She plucks the white berries from it one by one.


End file.
